Born Celina Consuela Gabriella Carvajal into a San Francisco family steeped in performance \u2014 her father a choreographer, her mother a prima ballerina \u2014 Hall was, by her own account, \u201cborn to be onstage.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLike a show pony,\u201d she joked.<\/p>\n
She trained first as a ballet dancer, studying in France on scholarship before abandoning that path for musical theater after seeing her sister perform in \u201c42nd Street.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even then, identity was something inherited before it was chosen.<\/p>\n
The Tony Award-winning, Grammy-nominated performer has spent much of her career moving between worlds: Broadway and television, rock clubs and film sets, musical theater precision and raw, unvarnished songwriting. Her latest solo album, \u201cLullabies for the End of the World,\u201d is an intimate, autobiographical work that explores co-dependency, heartbreak and self-reckoning.<\/p>\n
But for Hall, whose career includes a Tony-winning turn in \u201cHedwig and the Angry Inch,\u201d a starring role on Apple TV+\u2019s \u201cYour Friends and Neighbors,\u201d and acclaimed performances in film and television, the search for artistic identity has been unfolding for decades.<\/p>\n
The record\u2019s central themes \u2014 identity, authenticity, reinvention \u2014 are the same ones Hall has been sorting through for much of her adult life.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt wasn\u2019t until later that I started asking those questions,\u201d she said from New York City, which she splits her time between and West Cornwall, Connecticut. \u201cWhat do I want to represent? Who do I want to be? I was trying to find the authentic self instead of just going with the flow.\u201d<\/p>\n
The search began, in part, with an unlikely catalyst: a tonsillectomy.<\/p>\n
When Hall was 26, surgery altered her voice just as she had joined the rock band The Deafening. \u201cThey would just play really loud and never change the key,\u201d she said, laughing.<\/p>\n
At the same time, Hall found herself confronting larger questions about purpose and artistic direction.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was going through that moment of, what do I really want out of this industry?\u201d she said. \u201cIf I\u2019m going to keep doing this, I need to have a purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n
Until then, Hall said, she had largely been defined by external expectations.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was always who I was told to be,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The surgery became a kind of reset, both vocally and personally. It also coincided with another form of reinvention: the decision to change her professional name.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy real name is a lot,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
People stumbled over its pronunciation. It was harder to remember, harder to place. \u201cLena Hall\u201d felt streamlined, memorable. \u201cIt also just sounds like a rock star,\u201d she laughed.<\/p>\n
Hall, who is one-quarter Filipino with Spanish and Swedish ancestry, later grappled with whether changing her name obscured an important part of who she is. At one point, she said, she was advised that reverting to her birth name might improve her casting prospects as representation standards shifted.<\/p>\n
She declined.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat didn\u2019t feel authentic,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Instead, Hall came to see the name change as less a departure than a continuation.<\/p>\n
After making the change, she discovered that Carvajal itself was a family alteration, adopted generations ago in the Philippines.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m still honoring my family, even in the name change,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m continuing that tradition.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her Filipino heritage remains central to how she understands herself, even as some parts of that history remain difficult to trace.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m very curious to keep searching,\u201d Hall said. \u201cThat side of my family is where all the artistry came from.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hall\u2019s refusal to flatten herself into a single story or cultural identity is mirrored in her journey as a multi-hyphenate artist. She is, depending on the moment, a Broadway belter, a screen actor, a rock frontwoman, a conceptual songwriter.<\/p>\n
Her current side project, the all-female Radiohead tribute band Labiahead, gleefully complicates the picture further, reframing familiar songs through a new lens.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen women perform something written and performed by men, it changes it completely,\u201d she said. \u201cNothing even needs to be said. It just happens.\u201d<\/p>\n
The same could be said of Hall\u2019s own work.<\/p>\n
Across mediums, she is an artist interested less in performance as display than performance as revelation.<\/p>\n
Onscreen, she said, that often means doing less.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe camera is literally on your nose,\u201d she said. \u201cYou just have to think, and it picks it up.\u201d<\/p>\n
Between Celina Carvajal and Lena Hall, between ballet and rock, Broadway and Cornwall, Hall is making peace with multiplicity.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt a certain point,\u201d she said, \u201cyou stop asking who people want you to be and start figuring out who you already are.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Born Celina Consuela Gabriella Carvajal into a San Francisco family steeped in performance \u2014 her father a choreographer,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":222112,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2318,9,11,10],"class_list":["post-222111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-fishing","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222111\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/222112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}